


Controlling the Spin

by Musetotheworld



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [15]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Cat is unconcerned and badass, F/F, Kara is oblivious as usual, Pre-Relationship, set somewhere in season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 15:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10192517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Musetotheworld/pseuds/Musetotheworld
Summary: It should have been just about controlling the story. But it's never that simple, and Kara finds herself spending more time than she should wondering about what could possibly happen, and what never will.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Footage of Cat hotly kissing her female date in an elevator is leaked and goes viral. Cat is unfazed and loving her new status as a sex symbol and lesbian icon. Kara can't stop thinking about the footage and realises that her feelings run deeper than hero worship...

It leaks overnight.

Half of the evening crew is pulled to work on containing the situation, while the remaining journalists attempt to keep things as ‘business as usual’ as possible. The end of the world is no excuse for anything less than perfection at CatCo, why should this be any different? Even if it was far closer to home than some looming threat most people would never actually come face to face with, they still needed to make it seem as if CatCo were unphased by the news.

The morning crew was called in early, again splitting off with as many journalists and various employees as could be spared working to control the spin. But without Cat, no one knew what story they needed to tell. And Cat had been unreachable.

Not that anyone was surprised at that, not when the leak in question was a video of Cat in a situation barely two steps from public indecency in the elevator of an exclusive hotel from the evening before. No, everyone was very sure of where to find her, but no one was brave enough to interrupt. Not even their jobs were worth their life.

Kara was one of the first of the day crew on the scene, and her familiarity with Cat’s typical decisions instantly turned her into the leader of the team trying to get control over the situation. No denials, but no admission either. No trying to bury the story with other news, that would only convince people that there was a story to be found. General requests for privacy that didn’t imply one way or another what kind of privacy they were requesting.

It was exhausting work, not the least because CatCo had to have someone on the story as well. They couldn’t risk being scooped by another publication when it was their founder and CEO in question. Finding a balance between joining (and attempting to lead) the pack and trying to divert them seemed like an impossible order, but they couldn’t stop trying just because it was hard. Not one employee thought even suggesting that would be a smart idea.

By the time Cat arrived everyone was exhausted, and vaguely jealous of how unreasonably happy the woman looked. She damn near glowed as she got off the elevator, and it wasn’t just the morning sun behind her. Even without the footage you’d be able to tell she’d gotten laid. 

“Your latte, Miss Grant,” Kara says when Cat walks past her, falling into step and glad she’d remembered to set an alarm on her phone to run down and grab the drink before Cat arrived. The happier Cat was, the more dangerous disappointing her could be.

“Why is everyone staring at me,” Cat says as she strolls into her office and sits at her desk, curious but seeming not to care whether the reason was good or bad. 

“We’ve all been working on controlling the story,” Kara says, shocked that Cat apparently didn’t know why her employees might take more notice of her arrival that usual. She never came in without knowing what the leading story was, let alone when the story was her.

“What story?” Cat asks, seeming distracted by something on her phone. And now Kara is wondering if she should be calling J’onn to run tests and make sure it’s really Cat, because this does not sound like her boss at all.

“Um, you,” Kara stutters out, freezing when Cat looks up at her slowly, glare quickly replacing the smile she’d been wearing. “Someone at the hotel you were at last night released footage from the elevator. Pretty much every major site with a gossip section is covering it now.”

“I want the name of the building manager within the hour, and a meeting before the end of the day,” Cat snaps, reaching out her hand for the tablet that Kara’s clutching like a lifeline. “Let me see what they have and we’ll go from there.” Kara has the manager’s information already, and a meeting scheduled at two, but now isn’t the time to tell Cat that. Now is the time to give her the information she needs to tell her employees what will need done to control the situation.

“It’s mostly the video and some general speculation,” Kara points out, needing to fill in the silence somehow. “We put out the normal responses, requests for privacy and all of that, and then Jessica from celebrity news put out an article to keep up with everyone else.”

“So Jessica is handling the story so far?” Cat asks as she scrolls through the headlines, occasionally clicking on one and skimming through what’s being said.

“Yes, she’s the best at controlling stories. We weren’t sure what angle you would want to take on this, so she didn’t do much beyond report what everyone already knew,” Kara says, reaching over Cat’s desk to pull up CatCo’s version of the article.

“Oh, well that is entirely too vague to work,” Cat murmurs as she reads, frowning down at the tablet. “That won’t do at all. Get Jessica in here, I’ll give her a few quotes that will make this the CatCo exclusive it should be.”

“You want to move forward with the story?” Kara asks in disbelief, not remembering another time that had been Cat’s decision.

“Well, why not?” Cat says, standing and cocking her hip as she hands the tablet back. “It’s already out there, and a little controversy is never bad for sales. How they missed the whole thing with Aniston a few years ago I’ll never know, but I suppose this is as good an opportunity as any. And a one night fling might bring some criticisms, but you know I’ve never been one to care much what they say about me. If they get too bold, I’ll just buy them out.”

Only long habit and familiarity with Cat’s whims gets Kara’s feet moving, as shocked as she is by the apparent game plan. It’s Cat’s life and Cat’s company after all, Kara’s only role is to do what’s expected of her. Really, there’s no reason she should be getting worked up over this at all. She just has to deliver a message to Jessica and then her part is done.

Except she can’t forget about it, she can’t leave it alone. Especially when CatCo breaks the full story about Cat’s sexuality and how it’s affected her rise to the top. When she talks about how her mother hadn’t approved, but she’d never been willing to do anything but live her own life.

That alone makes Kara think, because she’ll never know if her parents would approve of her dating women as well as men. With marriages being arranged on Krypton, there were never any pairings that weren’t a man and woman. Love and attraction were obsolete, marriage and relationships were about families and power, nothing else. And Kara had been too young when she’d been sent away to know if that meant there wasn’t attraction at all, or if it was merely acting on it that was frowned upon and denied.

But even if they would disapprove, does that still matter? Kara is on Earth now, she’s the last Kryptonian female alive, and her culture with its strict and formal ways is gone. She will always remember it, she has a duty to uphold it, but does that mean she has to chain herself to the expectations of a dead planet at the cost of her own happiness?

She’d always thought yes, always been so conscious of what it meant to be Kryptonian. She’d found ways to keep the traditions alive even as she had to adapt them to Earth. She’d done everything she could to make sure her life and her decisions were ones her parents would approve of, because she’d thought it was her duty.

But here is Cat, the woman who still aches for her mother’s approval every bit as much as Kara does, living her life the way she feels is right. Kara has seen the way Cat still reaches for her mother, how she still tries to do everything right to finally get that ever elusive praise. And if a woman who still tries as hard as Cat does is able to live her own life and find her own happiness in the face of sure disapproval, then surely Kara can do the same, can’t she? There has to be a way to keep Krypton's memory alive without sacrificing her own happiness, surely there does.

It’s not until Kara finally accepts that fact and still feels as if she’s missing something that she realizes it was never just about Krypton.

No, it was jealousy too. Jealousy that Cat was able to live her life, and jealousy that someone else had been the person Cat chose to live it with. Blind, irrational jealousy.

It makes the next few days at work harder than they have any reason to be, now that the backlash and controversy of Cat coming out so late in life has died down, it’s almost quiet at CatCo. But that quiet is a curse, because with a relatively slow pace of work, Cat has projects in mind. Projects that require Kara to be present and helpful for long stretches of time.

By the end of the week Kara is certain that her crush runs deeper than she’d thought, and now that she’s managed to at least consider the possibility of dating a woman, her feelings are incredibly distracting. She honestly thinks that there should be laws against how attractive Cat manages to be literally every single day. It’s a distraction that Kara is completely unable to deal with.

The weekend brings a reprieve, but on Monday they’re right back into the same routine, and Kara is honestly surprised Cat hasn’t caught her staring yet. Winn and James both have, and she’d had to spend an entire day explaining that  _ no she still isn’t gay thank you, but bisexuality is a thing and oh my Rao I’m literally an alien have you guys considered things could work differently for me anyway? _

Needless to say it wasn’t the most comfortable of conversations, or one she was at all interested in having again. But it got the point across, and warned Kara that she needed to be a lot more careful about how she acted around Cat. If Winn and James both noticed, then for someone as observant as Cat it could only be a matter of time. And as much as Kara wished that she could have a conversation like that with Cat, she knows that the reality would probably be nowhere near what she’d want it to be. Walking out of the interaction with a warning regarding appropriate workplace behavior would be far more likely than walking out with a date.

So by Friday, Kara is sure she’s managed to successfully hide what she’s feeling. Cat hasn’t said anything, Winn has stopped sending her pointed glances, and things are slowly getting back to normal. She’s even figuring out how to ignore the constant attraction to her boss, which is helpful in being able to actually focus on her work.

But it never stays easy, and just before the end of the traditional working day the editors find a problem with one of the upcoming spreads, and Cat immediately cancels her evening to go through as many of the other spreads as possible, making sure there aren’t similar mistakes. Which means Kara of course volunteers to stick around and help even as the rest of the floor leaves for whatever plans they have.

Not her brightest decision, but then again it’s almost physically impossible for Kara to turn away from someone needing her help. Even when that help is just being a second set of eyes.

As Cat finishes the third spread of the night she sets it down in front of her the way she has the first two, but instead of picking up another turns to face Kara with a pointed look on her face. “As flattered as I am at the attention, and believe me I am, the staring needs to stop. Just because you suddenly know I’m interested in women does not mean I am interested in one that is taken. You’re very attractive Kara, but as long as you’re with James you should be focusing on him and not anyone else.”

“I’m not with James,” Kara protests, mind sticking on that rather than the rest of what Cat said, at least at first. Once her brain catches up, she flushes at the fact that Cat had caught her after all. “Wait, you think I’m attractive?”

“Really now, that’s what you got from all of that?” Cat asks with a sigh, but Kara doesn’t miss the flash of interest at the fact that she’s not with James.

“Well, isn’t that the important part?” she dares to ask, feeling herself flush despite the bravado she’s putting into her voice. “Mutual interest?”

“I suppose you have a point,” Cat says, shifting slightly closer as she does. “At very least, it gives us something to talk about.”

And as much as the conversation petrifies Kara, she’s also looking forward to what it might bring.


End file.
